Feature request: ability to set custom textures for skirts/dresses, etc.

[linkanon]

As of right now you can't set custom textures provided by hardlinker to the card face.
The way cards like this and this have it is by replacing the texture and renaming the material in the model. In principle it can be automated by using SB3UtilityScript.exe included with SB3U. The catch might be that the index of the texture might be different for different skirts.

Once you implement the plugin system I'll try to include the necessary data into the hardlinker plugin. Please implement the ability to run SB3U scripts as well (or if you can do it without it'll be even better).

Depending on how the plugin system works I might even do the Hair Highlighter plugin.

This is definitely out of scope of the next update though. Just something to keep in mind for when you're figuring out the plugin system

What is the process of changing textures/highlights? I'm not currently able to look into the process since I'm not at home. If it's a simple replacement of files in the .pp, then it would be pretty easy to add it to the program (and by extension this update). If it actually involves changing models, I'm going to have to package SB3UtilityScript with the program since I had to remove .xx and .xa manipulation to get rid of the SlimDX dependency, and that's not going to be a part of the update since it's going to delay the update by a considerable amount.

[linkanon]

It's not as simple as file replacement. You have to edit the .xx properties i.e. the material the skirt uses, to change the texture(diffuse slot i believe?) used by it. You also have to rename the material to something else or the game will try to color it and overwrite the texture(which means no hue adjustment for the skirt).
I didn't try it myself tho so all this is what I remember from /aa2g/. Still sounds straightforward and the script should be easy to make because SB3U's GUI generates the script for you as you do your thing, albeit with some GUI-specific stuff and new variables for everything. Pretty easy to clean it up and automate, the only issue being different texture indices which you might end up setting manually or, like I suggested, pick them from hardlinker plugin since it already catalogues some stuff about each texture using outfit.

Yeah, for the snowflaker you'll probably need the SlimDX stuff eventually. Definitely not for this update but who knows, you might eventually implement the render window for previewing pose and angle.

For this update custom personalities support is the most important part. Also there's HEXAPP now which merges lots of files(the ones with the maker poses at least) into one so you should account for that as well. Don't know what you should do if some idiot has a duplicate stand-alone in addition to the HEXAPP tho.

That would definitely be out of scope of this update. I don't even know if reverting the changes to the SB3Utility library would even be enough to allow for all of that to happen, so I might just pull apart SB3UtilityScript, include it as a library and work from there, but I don't really want to delve into it at all at this point.

I'll have a look at HEXAPP when it finishes downloading. Getting AA2Snowflake to index multiple personalities in one .pp shouldn't be hard at all since it's only looking for .icf and .lst files which are named based on the slot that the personality takes up, so all I need to do is get it to check for multiple .lst files instead of just one.

That's assuming that it retains the regex format or at least something similar, which it should if HEXA was trying to adhere to standards.

Right now AA2Snowflake will throw an exception if it finds a personality already taking another's slot, but it wouldn't be hard at all to change it to use the last loaded personality taking that slot which is how I assume the game also gets it to work.

[linkanon]

HEXA combines the poses .lst themselves so instead of one file per personality it's one line per personality so it's likely even easier.

I've just combed through HEXAPP, and the combined .pp and .lst files are unrelated to AA2Snowflake. The files (and by extension the .pp files with the regex) that are actually needed are in exactly the same format as the standalone versions, so HEXAPP doesn't need any special treatment.